Sunday 28 August 2011

Accessibility

Recently, I had to visit the US Embassy in my local country to take care of a few businesses. While I was there, I noticed a couple picking up their baby push chair to carry it up the stairs of the embassy. That is when I realized, the accessibility of this building was very limited to those that were physically fit enough to walk up the stairs. Not only that, the person needs to be fit enough to carry those that are unable to carry themself up the stairs.


I thought to myself, how could America, a country that prides itself to be leading the world on handicap rights, not have a wheel chair ramp? I understand that my country is not known to be wheel chair friendly in the slightest, but the US embassy is considered to be American soil, which you follow by American Law, not the country it sits within. That got me thinking, how would this sit back with the Politicians in America. I had to look up the law and realized, all American public buildings must be handicap accessible; ALL! Please see wikipedia Disability Rights in America


After this, I began to realize, how does Web Analytics handles this accessible issue. Yes, we could give everyone within the company access to the tool and data, but does this truly give them access to the data? Just because a building has a wheel chair ramp does not mean it is not wheel chair friendly. Giving access is just the first part.

As a member of the Web Analytics community, we not only have to give access to our stakeholders to the data, but we need to ensure that they can truly be self-serve. Self-serve to the point where they can freely access their own data and perform basic reporting analysis, ensuring the stakeholder does not have to wait for a simple report. This ensures the insight team is freed to do what their job requires; delivering insight that will benefit the company.


I want everyone to promise that they will do everything to ensure that they do everything possible to make Web Analytics accessible to their stakeholders. Do not just build a wheelchair ramp, but make their entire building is accessible. A self-serving stakeholder will ultimately be a happier stakeholder.


I would like to know, how accessible is your company? What are you doing to ensure that the web analytics data is accessible?

Sunday 21 August 2011

Favor for anyone that may know

Does anyone know how I can use mail 2 blogger to include full HTML. I want to add <center> and <a> tags. I need this for name and title attributes. Thank you in advance

Regards

John Andrews

Saturday 20 August 2011

Dual Analytics

In the last year, we have seen leaps and bounds forward in the industry we profess to be in. Omniture now allows live segmentation within its basic tool and is now introducing Social Analytics. Google Analytics is altering how the visit metric is calculated and continually add functionality to its free tool. But this is the key word, FREE. Google Analytics is able to give analytical data to companies that could not afford to track their data. For this one reason, I thank Google for offering this service. For this one reason, I also hate Google for allowing this to be a free tool. If I remember correctly, there was an article that mentioned that nearly half of the companies that have an analytical tool actually has two; a paid version and Google Analytics! Marketers only see that this is a free tool which they can utilize to verify the accuracy of the data being collected. Or as a certain marketer I know, use this to put on a site if they waited too long to get the analytical team involved to put it on the new site. Web Analysts see this as a hindrance since we are spending more time trying to explain why these two tools are reporting different data than actually delving insight for the company.

Now do not get me wrong, I am using Google Analytics on my own blog due to the fact that it is free. In fact, if I had to pay for this service, even $5 a month, I would pass on this information as I do not have enough traffic at this time to justify the cost. I do believe that there are several good reasons to leave it free, but only to certain organisations. If you are a for profit organisation, than you should not have the option to use Google Analytics; at least do not allow this to be a free service for them. By doing this, we, as a business could eliminate the headache of trying to explain why there is a difference.

With that said, why should anyone have more than one Analytical tool attached to their site? The logic behind doing this is like having two CEO’s of a single company; why would you do this? If you do this, which of the two CEO’s is right? The simple logic is, no one can tell you definitely which tool or CEO is correct (or at least more accurately). Each has their benefits and depending on the traffic to your site, the answer could change. The bottom line is choose one tool and use it; do not give your analyst more work to do.

Finally, there is one true fact about web analytical tools; they show accurately the trends of your site which is the most important aspect of the tool. Are you driving more traffic to your site? Is this traffic converting? Who is driving the most traffic to your site? Is your site performing how it should? Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends, etc. can all tell you about these trends. The business only cares about if we are driving more traffic or conversion, not the actual figures.